Sunday, December 29, 2013

"The Hippies" by Hunter S. Thompson

The best year to be a hippie was 1965, but then there
was not much to write about, because not much was happening in public
and most of what was happening in private was illegal.

The real year
of the hippie was 1966, despite the lack of publicity, which in 1967
gave way to a nationwide avalanche in Look, Life, Time, Newsweek,
the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Saturday Evening Post, and even
the Aspen Illustrated News, which did a special issue on hippies in
August of 1967 and made a record sale of all but 6 copies of a 3,500-copy
press run.

But 1967 was not really a good year to be a hippie. It
was a good year for salesmen and exhibitionists who called themselves
hippies and gave colorful interviews for the benefit of the mass media,
but serious hippies, with nothing to sell, found that they had little
to gain and a lot to lose by becoming public figures.

Many were harassed
and arrested for no other reason than their sudden identification
with a so-called cult of sex and drugs. The publicity rumble, which
seemed like a joke at first, turned into a menacing landslide.

So
quite a few people who might have been called the original hippies
in 1965 had dropped out of sight by the time hippies became a national
fad in 1967.

Ten
years earlier the Beat Generation went the same confusing route. From
1955 to about 1959 there were thousands of young people involved in
a thriving bohemian subculture that was only an echo by the time the
mass media picked it up in 1960.

Jack Kerouac was the novelist of
the Beat Generation in the same way that Ernest Hemingway was the
novelist of the Lost Generation, and Kerouac's classic "beat"
novel, On the Road, was published in 1957.

Yet by the time Kerouac
began appearing on television shows to explain the "thrust"
of his book, the characters it was based on had already drifted off
into limbo, to await their reincarnation as hippies some five years
later.

The purest example of this was Neal Cassidy [Cassady], who
served as a model for Dean Moriarity in On the Road and also for McMurphy
in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Publicity follows
reality, but only up to the point where a new kind of reality, created
by publicity, begins to emerge. So the hippie in 1967 was put in the
strange position of being an anti-culture hero at the same time as
he was also becoming a hot commercial property.

His banner of alienation
appeared to be planted in quicksand. The very society he was trying
to drop out of began idealizing him. He was famous in a hazy kind
of way that was not quite infamy but still colorfully ambivalent and
vaguely disturbing.

Despite
the mass media publicity, hippies still suffer or perhaps not from
a lack of definition. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language
was a best seller in 1966, the year of its publication, but it had
no definition for "hippie."

The closest it came was a definition
of "hippy": "having big hips; a hippy girl."

Its
definition of "hip" was closer to contemporary usage. "Hip"
is a slang word, said Random House, meaning "familiar with the
latest ideas, styles, developments, etc.; informed, sophisticated,
knowledgeable [?]." That question mark is a sneaky but meaningful
piece of editorial comment.

Everyone
seems to agree that hippies have some kind of widespread appeal, but
nobody can say exactly what they stand for. Not even the hippies seem
to know, although some can be very articulate when it comes to details.

"I
love the whole world," said a 23-year-old girl in San Francisco's
Haight-Ashbury district, the hippies' world capital.

"I am the
divine mother, part of Buddha, part of God, part of everything. I
live from meal to meal. I have no money, no possessions. Money is
beautiful only when it's flowing; when it piles up, it's a hang-up.
We take care of each other. There's always something to buy beans
and rice for the group, and someone always sees that I get 'grass'
[marijuana] or 'acid' [LSD]. I was in a mental hospital once because
I tried to conform and play the game. But now I'm free and happy."

She was then asked whether she used drugs often. "Fairly,"
she replied. "When I find myself becoming confused I drop out
and take a dose of acid. It's a short cut to reality; it throws you
right into it. Everyone should take it, even children. Why shouldn't
they be enlightened early, instead of waiting till they're old? Human
beings need total freedom. That's where God is at. We need to shed
hypocrisy, dishonesty, and phoniness and go back to the purity of
our childhood values."

The
next question was "Do you ever pray?" "Oh yes,"
she said. "I pray in the morning sun. It nourishes me with its
energy so I can spread my love and beauty and nourish others. I never
pray for anything; I don't need anything. Whatever turns me on is
a sacrament: LSD, sex, my bells, my colors ... that's the holy communion,
you dig?"

That's about the most definitive comment anybody's
ever going to get from a practicing hippie.

Unlike beatniks, many
of whom were writing poems and novels with the idea of becoming second-wave
Kerouacs or Allen Ginsbergs, the hippie opinion makers have cultivated
among their followers a strong distrust of the written word.

Journalists
are mocked, and writers are called "type freaks." Because
of this stylized ignorance, few hippies are really articulate.

They
prefer to communicate by dancing, or touching, or extrasensory perception
(ESP). They talk, among themselves, about "love waves" and
"vibrations" ("vibes") that come from other people.
That leaves a lot of room for subjective interpretation, and therein
lies the key to the hippies' widespread appeal.

This
is not to say that hippies are universally loved. From coast to coast,
the forces of law and order have confronted the hippies with extreme
distaste.

Here are some representative comments from a Denver, Colo.,
police lieutenant. Denver, he said, was becoming a refuge for "long-haired,
vagrant, antisocial, psychopathic, dangerous drug users, who refer
to themselves as a 'hippie subculture a group which rebels against
society and is bound together by the use and abuse of dangerous drugs
and narcotics."

"They range in age", he continued, "from 13 to the
early 20's, and they pay for their minimal needs by "mooching,
begging, and borrowing from each other, their friends, parents, and
complete strangers ... it is not uncommon to find as many as 20 hippies
living together in one small apartment, in communal fashion, with
their garbage and trash piled halfway to the ceiling in some cases."

One
of his co-workers, a Denver detective, explained that hippies are
easy prey for arrests, since "it is easy to search and locate
their drugs and marijuana because they don't have any furniture to
speak of, except for mattresses lying on the floor. They don't believe
in any form of productivity," he said, "and in addition
to a distaste for work, money, and material wealth, hippies believe
in free love, legalized use of marijuana, burning draft cards, mutual
love and help, a peaceful planet, and love for love's sake. They object
to war and believe that everything and everybody except the police
are beautiful."

Many
so-called hippies shout "love" as a cynical password and
use it as a smokescreen to obscure their own greed, hypocrisy, or
mental deformities.

Many hippies sell drugs, and although the vast
majority of such dealers sell only enough to cover their own living
expenses, a few net upward of $20,000 a year.

A kilogram (2.2 pounds)
of marijuana, for instance, costs about $35 in Mexico. Once across
the border it sells (as a kilo) for anywhere from $150 to $200. Broken
down into 34 ounces, it sells for $15 to $25 an ounce, or $510 to
$850 a kilo. The price varies from city to city, campus to campus,
and coast to coast.

"Grass" is generally cheaper in California
than it is in the East. The profit margin becomes mind-boggling regardless
of the geography when a $35 Mexican kilogram is broken down into individual
"joints," or marijuana cigarettes, which sell on urban street
corners for about a dollar each.

The risk naturally increases with
the profit potential. It's one thing to pay for a trip to Mexico by
bringing back three kilos and selling two in a circle of friends:
The only risk there is the possibility of being searched and seized
at the border.

But a man who gets arrested for selling hundreds of
"joints" to high school students on a St. Louis street corner
can expect the worst when his case comes to court.

The
British historian Arnold Toynbee, at the age of 78, toured San Francisco's
Haight-Ashbury district and wrote his impressions for the London Observer.

"The leaders of the Establishment," he said, "will
be making the mistake of their lives if they discount and ignore the
revolt of the hippies and many of the hippies' non-hippie contemporaries
on the grounds that these are either disgraceful wastrels or traitors,
or else just silly kids who are sowing their wild oats."

Toynbee
never really endorsed the hippies; he explained his affinity in the
longer focus of history. If the human race is to survive, he said,
the ethical, moral, and social habits of the world must change: the
emphasis must switch from nationalism to mankind.

And Toynbee saw
in the hippies a hopeful resurgence of the basic humanitarian values
that were beginning to seem to him and other long-range thinkers like
a tragically lost cause in the war-poisoned atmosphere of the 1960's.

He was not quite sure what the hippies really stood for, but since
they were against the same things he was against (war, violence, and
dehumanized profiteering), he was naturally on their side, and vice
versa.

There
is a definite continuity between the beatniks of the 1950's and the
hippies of the 1960's. Many hippies deny this, but as an active participant
in both scenes, I'm sure it's true.

I was living in Greenwich Village
in New York City when the beatniks came to fame during 1957 and 1958.
I moved to San Francisco in 1959 and then to the Big Sur coast for
1960 and 1961. Then after two years in South America and one in Colorado,
I was back in San Francisco, living in the Haight-Ashbury district,
during 1964, 1965, and 1966.

None of these moves was intentional in
terms of time or place; they just seemed to happen. When I moved into
the Haight-Ashbury, for instance, I'd never even heard that name.
But I'd just been evicted from another place on three days' notice,
and the first cheap apartment I found was on Parnassus Street, a few
blocks above Haight.

At
that time the bars on what is now called "the street" were
predominantly Negro. Nobody had ever heard the word "hippie,"
and all the live music was Charlie Parker-type jazz.

Several miles
away, down by the bay in the relatively posh and expensive Marina
district, a new and completely unpublicized nightclub called the Matrix
was featuring an equally unpublicized band called the Jefferson Airplane.

At about the same time, hippie author Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest, 1962, and Sometimes a Great Notion, 1964) was conducting
experiments in light, sound, and drugs at his home at La Honda, in
the wooded hills about 50 miles south of San Francisco.

As the result
of a network of circumstance, casual friendships, and connections
in the drug underworld, Kesey's band of Merry Pranksters was soon
playing host to the Jefferson Airplane and then to the Grateful Dead,
another wildly electric band that would later become known on both
coasts along with the Airplane as the original heroes of the San Francisco
acid-rock sound.

During 1965, Kesey's group staged several much-publicized
Acid Tests, which featured music by the Grateful Dead and free Kool-Aid
spiked with LSD.

The same people showed up at the Matrix, the Acid
Tests, and Kesey's home in La Honda. They wore strange, colorful clothes
and lived in a world of wild lights and loud music. These were the
original hippies.

It
was also in 1965 that I began writing a book on the Hell's Angels,
a notorious gang of motorcycle outlaws who had plagued California
for years, and the same kind of weird coincidence that jelled the
whole hippie phenomenon also made the Hell's Angels part of the scene.

I was having a beer with Kesey one afternoon in a San Francisco tavern
when I mentioned that I was on my way out to the headquarters of the
Frisco Angels to drop off a Brazilian drum record that one of them
wanted to borrow.

Kesey said he might as well go along, and when he
met the Angels he invited them down to a weekend party in La Honda.
The Angels went and thereby met a lot of people who were living in
the Haight-Ashbury for the same reason I was (cheap rent for good
apartments).

People who lived two or three blocks from each other
would never realize it until they met at some pre-hippie party. But
suddenly everybody was living in the Haight-Ashbury, and this accidental
unity took on a style of its own.

All that it lacked was a label,
and the San Francisco Chronicle quickly came up with one. These people
were "hippies," said the Chronicle, and, lo, the phenomenon
was launched.

The Airplane and the Grateful Dead began advertising
their sparsely attended dances with psychedelic posters, which were
given away at first and then sold for $1 each, until finally the poster
advertisements became so popular that some of the originals were selling
in the best San Francisco art galleries for more than $2,000.

By this
time both the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead had gold-plated
record contracts, and one of the Airplane's best numbers, "White
Rabbit," was among the best-selling singles in the nation.

By
that time, too, the Haight-Ashbury had become such a noisy mecca for
freaks, drug peddlers, and curiosity seekers that it was no longer
a good place to live. Haight Street was so crowded that municipal
buses had to be rerouted because of the traffic jams.

At
the same time, the "Hashbury" was becoming a magnet for
a whole generation of young dropouts, all those who had canceled their
reservations on the great assembly line: the high-rolling, soul-bending
competition for status and security in the ever-fattening yet ever-narrowing
American economy of the late 1960's.

As the rewards of status grew
richer, the competition grew stiffer. A failing grade in math on a
high school report card carried far more serious implications than
simply a reduced allowance: it could alter a boy's chances of getting
into college and, on the next level, of getting the "right job."

As the economy demanded higher and higher skills, it produced more
and more technological dropouts. The main difference between hippies
and other dropouts was that most hippies were white and voluntarily
poor.

Their backgrounds were largely middle class; many had gone to
college for a while before opting out for the "natural life": an easy, unpressured existence on the fringe of the money economy.

Their parents, they said, were walking proof of the fallacy of the
American notion that says "work and suffer now; live and relax
later." The
hippies reversed that ethic. "Enjoy life now," they said,
"and worry about the future tomorrow."

Most take the question
of survival for granted, but in 1967, as their enclaves in New York
and San Francisco filled up with penniless pilgrims, it became obvious
that there was simply not enough food and lodging.

A
partial solution emerged in the form of a group called the Diggers,
sometimes referred to as the "worker-priests" of the hippie
movement. The Diggers are young and aggressively pragmatic; they set
up free lodging centers, free soup kitchens, and free clothing distribution
centers.

They comb hippie neighborhoods, soliciting donations of everything
from money to stale bread and camping equipment. In the Hashbury,
Diggers' signs are posted in local stores, asking for donations of
hammers, saws, shovels, shoes, and anything else that vagrant hippies
might use to make themselves at least partially self-supporting.

The
Hashbury Diggers were able, for a while, to serve free meals, however
meager, each afternoon in Golden Gate Park, but the demand soon swamped
the supply. More and more hungry hippies showed up to eat, and the
Diggers were forced to roam far afield to get food.

The
concept of mass sharing goes along with the American Indian tribal
motif that is basic to the whole hippie movement. The cult of tribalism
is regarded by many as the key to survival.

Poet Gary Snyder, one
of the hippie gurus, or spiritual guides, sees a "back to the
land" movement as the answer to the food and lodging problem.
He urges hippies to move out of the cities, form tribes, purchase
land, and live communally in remote areas.

By early 1967 there were
already a half dozen functioning hippie settlements in California,
Nevada, Colorado, and upstate New York. They were primitive shack-towns,
with communal kitchens, half-alive fruit and vegetable gardens, and
spectacularly uncertain futures.

Back in the cities the vast majority
of hippies were still living from day to day. On Haight Street those
without gainful employment could easily pick up a few dollars a day
by panhandling.

The influx of nervous voyeurs and curiosity seekers
was a handy money-tree for the legion of psychedelic beggars. Regular
visitors to the Hashbury found it convenient to keep a supply of quarters
in their pockets so that they wouldn't have to haggle about change.

The panhandlers were usually barefoot, always young, and never apologetic.
They would share what they collected anyway, so it seemed entirely
reasonable that strangers should share with them.

Unlike the beatniks,
few hippies are given to strong drink. Booze is superfluous in the
drug culture, and food is regarded as a necessity to be acquired at
the least possible expense.

A "family" of hippies will work
for hours over an exotic stew or curry, but the idea of paying three
dollars for a meal in a restaurant is out of the question.

Some
hippies work, others live on money from home, and many get by with
part-time jobs, loans from old friends, or occasional transactions
on the drug market.

In San Francisco the post office is a major source
of hippie income. Jobs like sorting mail don't require much thought
or effort.

The sole support of one "clan" (or "family,"
or "tribe") was a middle-aged hippie known as Admiral Love,
of the Psychedelic Rangers, who had a regular job delivering special
delivery letters at night.

There was also a hippie-run employment
agency on Haight Street; anyone needing temporary labor or some kind
of specialized work could call up and order whatever suitable talents
were available at the moment.

Significantly, the hippies have attracted
more serious criticism from their former compatriots of the New Left
than they have from what would seem to be their natural antagonists
on the political right.

Conservative William Buckley's National Review,
for instance, says, "The hippies are trying to forget about original
sin and it may go hard with them hereafter."

The National Review
editors completely miss the point that serious hippies have already
dismissed the concept of original sin and that the idea of a hereafter
strikes them as a foolish, anachronistic joke.

The concept of some
vengeful God sitting in judgment on sinners is foreign to the whole
hippie ethic. Its God is a gentle abstract deity not concerned with
sin or forgiveness but manifesting himself in the purest instincts
of "his children."

The
New Left brand of criticism has nothing to do with theology. Until
1964, in fact, the hippies were so much a part of the New Left that
nobody knew the difference.

"New Left," like "hippie"
and "beatnik," was a term coined by journalists and headline
writers, who need quick definitions of any subject they deal with.
The term came out of the student rebellion at the University of California's
Berkeley campus in 1964 and 1965.

What began as a Free Speech Movement
in Berkeley soon spread to other campuses in the East and Midwest
and was seen in the national press as an outburst of student activism
in politics, a healthy confrontation with the status quo.

On
the strength of the free speech publicity, Berkeley became the axis
of the New Left. Its leaders were radical, but they were also deeply
committed to the society they wanted to change.

A prestigious University
of California faculty committee said the activists were the vanguard
of a "moral revolution among the young," and many professors
approved.

Those who were worried about the radicalism of the young
rebels at least agreed with the direction they were taking: civil
rights, economic justice, and a new morality in politics. The anger
and optimism of the New Left seemed without limits.

The time had come,
they said, to throw off the yoke of a politico-economic establishment
that was obviously incapable of dealing with new realities.

The
year of the New Left publicity was 1965. About the same time there
was mention of something called the pot (marijuana) left.

Its members
were generally younger than the serious political types, and the press
dismissed them as a frivolous gang of "druggies" and sex
"kooks" who were only along for the ride.

Yet
as early as the spring of 1966, political rallies in Berkeley were
beginning to have overtones of music, madness, and absurdity.

Dr.
Timothy Leary the ex-Harvard professor whose early experiments with
LSD made him, by 1966, a sort of high priest, martyr, and public relations
man for the drug was replacing Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech
Movement, as the number-one underground hero.

Students who were once
angry activists began to lie back in their pads and smile at the world
through a fog of marijuana smoke or to dress like clowns and Indians
and stay "zonked" on LSD for days at a time. The hippies
were more interested in dropping out of society than they were in
changing it.

The break came in late 1966, when Ronald Reagan was elected
governor of California by almost a million-vote plurality.

In that
same November the GOP gained 50 seats in Congress and served a clear
warning on the Johnson administration that despite all the headlines
about the New Left, most of the electorate was a lot more conservative
than the White House antennae had indicated.

The lesson was not lost
on the hippies, many of whom considered themselves at least part-time
political activists.

One of the most obvious casualties of the 1966
elections was the New Left's illusion of its own leverage. The radical-hippie
alliance had been counting on the voters to repudiate the "right-wing,
warmonger" elements in Congress, but instead it was the "liberal"
Democrats who got stomped.

The hippies saw the election returns as
brutal confirmation of the futility of fighting the Establishment
on its own terms.

There had to be a whole new scene, they said, and
the only way to do it was to make the big move either figuratively
or literally from Berkeley to the Haight-Ashbury, from pragmatism
to mysticism, from politics to dope, from the involvement of protest
to the peaceful disengagement of love, nature, and spontaneity.

The
mushrooming popularity of the hippie scene was a matter of desperate
concern to the young political activists.

They saw a whole generation
of rebels drifting off to a drugged limbo, ready to accept almost
anything as long as it came with enough "soma" (as Aldous
Huxley named the psychic escape drug of the future in his science-fiction
novel Brave New World, 1932).

New Left writers and critics at first
commended the hippies for their frankness and originality. But it
soon became obvious that few hippies cared at all for the difference
between political left and right, much less between the New Left and
the Old Left.

"Flower Power" (their term for the power of
love), they said, was nonpolitical. And the New Left quickly responded
with charges that hippies were "intellectually flabby,"
that they lacked "energy" and "stability," that
they were actually "nihilists" whose concept of love was
"so generalized and impersonal as to be meaningless."

And
it was all true. Most hippies are too drug-oriented to feel any sense
of urgency beyond the moment. Their slogan is "Now," and
that means instantly.

Unlike political activists of any stripe, hippies
have no coherent vision of the future which might or might not exist.
The hippies are afflicted by an enervating sort of fatalism that is,
in fact, deplorable.

And the New Left critics are heroic, in their
fashion, for railing at it.

But the awful possibility exists that
the hippies may be right, that the future itself is deplorable and
so why not live for Now? Why not reject the whole fabric of American
society, with all its obligations, and make a separate peace?

The
hippies believe they are asking this question for a whole generation
and echoing the doubts of an older generation.